New TI Chipsets Expand 4K UHD DLP Applications

Texas Instruments (TI) yesterday announced an expanded family of chipsets designed to bring 4K Ultra HD technology to new applications, including “laser TVs, mobile smart TVs, smart home displays,” and a range of projectors, including handheld pico projectors.

The fruits of TI’s latest round of technologies won’t be evident in consumer products right away but they build on the company’s the first affordable UHD offering, the DLP660TE chipset used in projectors such as Optoma’s $2,500 UHD65, a Sound & Vision 2017 Top Pick. With a native resolution of 2716 x 1529, the chip uses “pixel shifting” to produce an onscreen image with more than 8 million pixels, roughly the same as a native 3840 x 2160 UHD chip.

TI says the new chips exceed the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) definition of
4K UHD technology, displaying more than 8 million pixels and span a range of power, size, brightness, and performance levels to help designers achieve “any 4K UHD end-equipment objective.”

We’ll have to wait for new projectors that employ TI’s new chips, which includes the currently available DLP660TE, designed to produce brightness levels up to 5,000 lumens; the DLP470TE, built to produce up to 4,000 lumens; and the DLP470TP, a compact offering intended to bring 4K image quality to mobile smart TVs and pico projectors at brightness levels up to 1,500 lumens.